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Friday, January 10, 2014

I’m the first to say he’s not boyfriend material. He came on too strong, and then he backed off too fast. Plus, all these hurricanes he’s causing suggests if it does work you guys will need a lot of couples therapy.

But Helen, you don't friend-zone a weather god.

The highway’s flooded, and it’s snowing inside our apartment. The McDonald's where you two had your ironic non-date? I don’t want to know what happened in the ball pit. I just want it to stop being struck by lightning.

Look, remember the time Mark grabbed my ass at the office New Years party? He'd been hitting on me all night even though I straight-up told him I'm straight, and come midnight he's giving me a rectal exam? Remember how I reacted?

Yeah. I decked him.

But if he threw hurricanes along with his temper tantrums, baby we'd have moved to Virginia and be raising a little family of Pomeranians right now. Because you don't screw with that. At least not until our lease is up and we can get out of here.

Look. Your mom's a Reformed Episcopalian, right? Well this god is a fixer-upper too. And this is all still his fault, but just for right now, and this is the only time I’m ever going to say it… lead Thor on.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

I didn’t have a meltdown the other day, and neither did Michael Bay. He was on my television for no good
reason and for lots of money. Beneath my television sat a box of non-perishable
food I was about to run over to the local Methodist Church.
Bay’s teleprompter malfunctioned and so he stammered, failed to adlib, apologized,
and walked away from the giant curved television he was supposed to pretend to
like. Then I walked to the car to drive food out for the homeless

It pings off a recent screed that “Generation X is Tired of Your Bullshit.” As though there is a Generation X. Generation X has as many bullshit-producers and -profiteers as any previous generation – perhaps more,
with technology and secularism providing more pulpits.

There is staggering disparity of experience among my
generation, and more in the generation that followed. Some of the children I
grew up with make six figures on Wall Street. Some can’t afford the internet
and sleep in parks. Some are dead.

What does any generation have in common? Being born within
a few of the same decades before life happened to them? Genes, economic
background, religion, sex and gender and sexuality, and the experience of all
those items is wildly disparate. Most of my generation doesn't know what it's
liked to be pulled over at 2:00 AM for driving too nice a car, yet my
generation contains both the profiled and the profilers. Half of Generations X and Y never opened a book last year, and
more of Generations X and Y have published books than any in American
history. These generations are in the Occupy
Wall Street, the Tea Party, Anonymous, political lobby firms, the
unemployment line, the military, and the living room on X-Box Live.

The first non-ironic version of Ascent of Man you've seen in years.
We have this in common!

It’s beautiful and ugly and irreconcilable It’s why I can read Avarind Adiga while my brother watches Howard Stern clips on Youtube, both of us busy while
my sister bakes cupcakes shaped like snowmen. That’s why Facebook walls are
full of political memes that three people Like and eighteen people roll their
eyes at and scroll past. That’s why the media says the media is lying. By disregarding
the monolith, more people have opportunities at satisfaction. And more people
means less in common.

If you’re waiting for me to say that I hate or love
this, you’ll be disappointed. I experience both of those emotions towards this
issue, and other emotions. It’s a complicated response that has changed and will likely
change again. If I, one person, occupy so shifty a node on so obvious an issue, how are we supposed to
pretend that New Yorkers, white people, Americans or Homo sapiens sapiens think
one thing?

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Photo of controversial non-celebs?
So topical! I feel more bloggy already.

Happy January, everybody! I hope your New Years had minimal
embarrassments and car wrecks.

One thing I learned at the end of 2013 is that I’m very bad
at traditional blogging. Divert massive amounts of brain juice to write fiction
every day? Can do. But personal missives and polemics every 2-3 days? I clearly need to
learn. Let’s take a crack at this.

Because it’s January, I’m embarking on another novel. For now
the project title is We Don’t Always
Drown. January has been kind to my compositions for the last three years
and is fast becoming the ritual spot to start new books. I know this project is
right because I wound up bailing on everything last night just to outline bits
of it. It’s demanding a more robust plot skeleton than usual, possibly because
I’ve had this idea for two years and plot vines kept growing out of it. There
are so many matters to consider when Fantasy criminals compete for a corpse
stuck in an ice cube.

Results from a brainstorming session
on genre blending.

We Don’t Always Drown is
the direct sequel to The Last House in
the Sky, which I haven’t published, and which makes the sequel composition
seem slightly dubious. Yet I’ve invented a very big world and have at least
five novels in store for this cast – in addition to thirteen more ideas that
might require their own novellas and novels later. The first book was such a
hit with test readers that I’m tempted to rush it out, but because this is the
beginning of a long undertaking, I want to make sure the limb holds. There’s no
sin equally contemptible as retconning all the important bits in after a book’s
been out.

December went well. I managed to finish drafts of all four target
stories, and submitted three in earnest. If you don’t know, both Strange Horizons and F&SF opened to digital submissions a short while ago. One straggling
short story needs a little more time in the pressure cooker; I’ll probably
straighten it out in the spring after this novel is drafted. Most importantly,
that old Magical Girl story is out the door and making the rounds in what feels
like a truly finished form. Six years of haunting, finally exorcised. It’s striking
how draining what ultimately turns out to be so few words can be.

Awful author selfie?
Okay. Now it's a blog post.

My 2014 convention schedule is almost set. I have to make Boskone in February to see my old VP peeps, and am currently trying to figure out how to fit both ReaderCon and NASFiC into the same week this summer. My room is already booked for World Fantasy in D.C. Who will I see there?

To the general reader public: #NaNoReMo is coming back, but
as you guessed, it won’t be in January. We had some folks request it be moved
forward a bit, and so we’ve settled on
March. Silly as I may be, February is Black History month, the only
official month of anything that I actually respect and refuse to compete
against. So you’ve got two months to pick out that classic book you’ve been
putting off for two long. There ought to be a blog post about that soon. I love
#NaNoReMo after last year’s intimate weeks plumbing Middlemarch, which is still challenging my view of how fiction
operates.